even if you were technically correct why would a company hire someone who demonstrates that they are unable to disagree in such a way that a heated argument does not ensue? i'd say they dodged a bullet.
The interviewer's job (I was briefed beforehand) was to make sure I know my concurrency, because they use a lot of it there.
I have all the patience and time in the world to discuss my ideas.
I had the problems, the solutions, slide decks and a Miro board ready to go.
He wanted to shut down discussion at every turn with nonsense like "so you think no banks work at all?". Sure, I can grin and eat shit, or I can say "banks predate your CRUD operations by just a little bit".
If he had working knowledge on how to represent mutable money amounts in a distributed environment, he didn't let on. I was all ears.
So I pushed back on him, and I'll push back on you:
> even if you were technically correct why would a company hire someone...
Because I'm technically correct.
You're certainly not alone in your appraisal of the situation. The market over here works exactly this way. Correct, reliable systems come a distant second to agreeing with the team.
Technical discussions are incredibly likely to devolve into people discussions.
No people discussion has ever worked it's way back into being about fixing the broken software.
Pay him no mind. I shiver at the thought that he might be at management level and passed potential hires because they didn't not disagree in the way he liked.
If anything, you dodged a bullet from a potential job where nothing gets done correctly.
The uptime of cash in my wallet is pretty close to 100%. It's extremely rare that I have to use it, but it's incredibly convenient to have each time it's required
> it's incredibly convenient to have each time it's required
Sadly there is an increasing preponderance on the part of retailers to do one of two things:
1. Go card only (sadly happening in far too many places)
2. Make it incredibly difficult to pay by cash (e.g. 10 card tills, 1 cash till with long queues because it is also the cigarette/lottery ticket/package collection till)
The only people remaining who will almost kiss you for offering cash instead of card are taxi drivers.
If you look at uptime as discrete set of events when you need to pay for something, my cash uptime is not looking great nowadays. "Sorry I can't break that" or machines accepting coins which you don't have at hand. Just to be clear I despise CC companies the system is broken in many ways.
Here in France, many places won't take large bills. You can usually forget about paying with 100 € bills, and many will be iffy even about 50s.
I'm also pretty sure it's illegal to pay cash for anything above 1000 €.
I'm curious how this legislation will end up, because the reason to push for cashless is that you should think of the children^Wterrorists. And much of this push comes from the EU itself (see chatcontrol).
I don't know about other countries, but in Poland you must accept cash except for a few cases (over internet, large transactions, places without employees).
Well its about time (a decade ago) to ignore those places and be vocal about it.
Contactless is all fine and dandy but straight out refusal to handle cash is a big negative for the users, which is the only perspective anybody cares about. On top of obvious long term massive loss for society and personal freedom. Don't feed the actors that are harming you / us.
Thanks, your comment was the first one which linked the two.
Revolut is the biggest private company in all of Europe.
Perhaps it’s me but I still find it kinda wild that a single power outage in London can shut down Google DC and it can lead to Revolut shutting down for some time disrupting much of the economy which depended upon it
Perhaps this could’ve been prevented, which makes me wonder how much of code written at Revolut is ai generated and its ai policy?
If their infrastructure is tightly coupled to a cloud provider in a single region then that's what they need to be work on and not necessarily their AI policy.
Revolut needs a way to proactively notify users when their cards aren’t working. It’s so frustrating having to go to Reddit just to find out that Revolut is down.
My revolut cards (both google pay and actual physical cards) were failing to process payments and had to use my backup card from a traditional bank instead
From what I've seen—personally and from a variety of online sources—there's intermittent availability of basically everything, which means you might be able to access the app, or you might be able to pay by card, but that's going to change potentially from minute to minute, with an average of somewhere around 10% uptime. (Which, of course, means that you, personally, might just be in the 90% of downtime all the time until it's resolved.)
Take with appropriate seasoning, given its anecdotal nature.
Once again, blockchains that use USDC continue to run without any serious outages for years. I just paid for an item with USDC (using Phantom Wallet) right now and there are many other examples of this.
No need to wait for a bank and it doesn't matter the blockchain, as long as it supports USDC and you have a crypto wallet, the payment goes through.
Stripe knows this already and crypto payments will be here for a very very long time as they already are today.
> I've been hearing about bitcoin for 15+ years and I don't think I've ever walked into a shop where they accepted it.
I didn't say bitcoin. I said blockchains that use USDC.
> So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
No-one cares if 1 person (out of 8 billion and trillions of bots) won't use it. It exists and Shopify and Stripe have crypto payments with USDC which is useful for both humans and agents.
Not saying it's a vibe-coding issue. But I just imagine a scenario where a global service experiences significant disruption due to a vibe-coded release. No person understands how it works or is able to figure out in less than a week because no human has ever glanced at the code for a couple years, so the decision is taken to unleash LLM agents directly on production to fix the issue. Of course, one of these agents has to do some database migration but there is a breaking change, so they launch a sub-agent to deal with that; the sub-agent doesn't have a full context, so it decides that the easiest way would be to drop the database and so it does. The latest _successful_ backup took place a month ago.
Got into a heated argument where the interviewer insisted it was perfectly acceptable to store money as a mutable row in a database.
I pushed back with the standard "You append transactions (including corrections) to a ledger" but he wasn't convinced.
I whipped out the standard two-ATMs -separated-by-a-distance overdraft example, and how you can create or destroy money that way.
He said it made no sense as an example because it was buggy and you would never release buggy code.
I asked if he'd done bug fixes before (yes) but obviously he was going to keep digging in further.
The irony of it was that he was part of the blockchain team.
I have all the patience and time in the world to discuss my ideas.
I had the problems, the solutions, slide decks and a Miro board ready to go.
He wanted to shut down discussion at every turn with nonsense like "so you think no banks work at all?". Sure, I can grin and eat shit, or I can say "banks predate your CRUD operations by just a little bit".
If he had working knowledge on how to represent mutable money amounts in a distributed environment, he didn't let on. I was all ears.
So I pushed back on him, and I'll push back on you:
> even if you were technically correct why would a company hire someone...
Because I'm technically correct.
You're certainly not alone in your appraisal of the situation. The market over here works exactly this way. Correct, reliable systems come a distant second to agreeing with the team.
Technical discussions are incredibly likely to devolve into people discussions.
No people discussion has ever worked it's way back into being about fixing the broken software.
If anything, you dodged a bullet from a potential job where nothing gets done correctly.
who or what is mrkeen?
Sadly there is an increasing preponderance on the part of retailers to do one of two things:
The only people remaining who will almost kiss you for offering cash instead of card are taxi drivers.I'm also pretty sure it's illegal to pay cash for anything above 1000 €.
I'm curious how this legislation will end up, because the reason to push for cashless is that you should think of the children^Wterrorists. And much of this push comes from the EU itself (see chatcontrol).
No cash means no freedom.
Contactless is all fine and dandy but straight out refusal to handle cash is a big negative for the users, which is the only perspective anybody cares about. On top of obvious long term massive loss for society and personal freedom. Don't feed the actors that are harming you / us.
No redundancy redundancy?
No redundancy redundancy?
No redundancy redundancy?
No redundancy redundancy?
Revolut is the biggest private company in all of Europe.
Perhaps it’s me but I still find it kinda wild that a single power outage in London can shut down Google DC and it can lead to Revolut shutting down for some time disrupting much of the economy which depended upon it
Perhaps this could’ve been prevented, which makes me wonder how much of code written at Revolut is ai generated and its ai policy?
As in not publicly traded? That's surprising, to be honest. How is that even measured?
Probably difficult if the cause is their cloud infrastructure being down.
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/20/google-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c58jd2kjp93xt
Take with appropriate seasoning, given its anecdotal nature.
No need to wait for a bank and it doesn't matter the blockchain, as long as it supports USDC and you have a crypto wallet, the payment goes through.
Stripe knows this already and crypto payments will be here for a very very long time as they already are today.
So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
I didn't say bitcoin. I said blockchains that use USDC.
> So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
No-one cares if 1 person (out of 8 billion and trillions of bots) won't use it. It exists and Shopify and Stripe have crypto payments with USDC which is useful for both humans and agents.
[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
the point was about physical flesh-to-flesh shopping experiences.
If you were following Stripe for years, you would know that they are already using crypto for payments and it is here to stay.
[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
$100B value down the drain.